Through the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council, global corporations and state politicians vote behind closed doors to try to rewrite state laws that govern your rights. These so-called "model bills" reach into almost every area of American life and often directly benefit huge corporations. ALEC is the heart and soul of the GOP.

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Thursday, September 3, 2015

The Republicans Lie – About Everything

The Republicans Lie – About Everything

By: Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Republican dishonesty, not only about what they do and what they would like to do, but about the world we live in, are endemic. And the situation is getting steadily worse as Republicans daily seem more unhinged, leaving liberals and progressives shaking their heads in dismay.

Do you remember last year when Public Policy Polling revealed that more Louisiana Republicans blame President Obama for the mishandling of Katrina relief efforts than blame President Bush? It is a matter of public record that Barack Obama was only a freshman senator then, while Bush had been president for half a decade. Almost half of Louisiana Republicans didn’t know who to blame.

Of course, Republicans have also blamed Obama for the Iraq War and routinely pretend that there were no terrorist attacks on U.S. soil while Bush was president (9/11 anyone?). Not only that, but Fox News has excised any subsequent Bush-era terrorist attacks from public memory. Republicans have also conveniently forgotten that Bush presided over the economic collapse of 2008. Obama wasn’t elected until November 4 of that year and did not take office until the following January.

Of course, President Obama is currently being blamed for the immigration crisis at the border that Republicans are responsible for. Bush signed the law; Obama gets blamed.

Republicans attack President Obama for taking too many vacation days. In reality, as Al Sharpton pointed out on August 9, 2013,

[Obama] has taken 92 days of vacation since he was sworn in. How many did President (George W.) Bush take by the same point in his presidency? Three hundred and sixty seven. Yes, more than a full year of vacation.

PolitiFact has rated this statement “mostly true” in that Bush spent some working vacation days at his Texas ranch. I remember Bush being on vacation all the time; Republicans don’t even remember Bush.

Republicans want to sue and impeach President Obama for signing executive orders, even though he has issued far fewer executive orders than President Bush, whose executive orders were not the object of Republican complaint.

For example, on September 25, 2012, FactCheck.org pointed out that “Obama has issued 139 executive orders as of Sept. 25 [2012]…Bush issued 160 executive orders through Sept. 20, 2004, a comparable amount of time.”

Again, if you want to count executive orders you can do so; it’s a matter of public record and the University of California Santa Barbara helpfully tracks them by year and president. Republicans prefer just making stuff up because the facts do not agree with the fantasies they want to push.

Republicans have claimed Obama is adding to the deficit (while they add to it themselves via tax breaks for their rich owners) when in fact he has been steadily reducing the deficit. In fact, last year, Obama shrank the deficit to a 5-year low. And as Paul Krugman points out, there was never a crisis in the first place. As with all their other scandals, it was manufactured by conservatives to advance their anti-Social Security and Medicare agenda.

Democrats like to believe that when they engage the Right in debate that they do so on more or less equal terms. Both sides are, after all, comprised of sentient human beings. But Republicans have given substance to the old childhood taunt, “I am rubber, you are glue, words bounce off me and stick to you.”

They are literally impervious to facts.

And not only is President Obama magically to blame for all Bush’s manifest misdeeds, he is somehow also to blame for every misdeed committed anywhere in the world.

Everything that happens is somehow Obama’s fault and John McCain has turned himself into Chuck Norris, able to strangle the butterfly that flapped its wings in Siberia to prevent a typhoon hitting the West Coast. Only John McCain, who voted for the Iraq War, could have stopped the Iraq War.

This must make sense only to Republicans, who nod their heads sagely.

If only they could do so in strait jackets, which is arguably where they belong.

Republicans live in a world where women’s bodies magically repel unwanted sperm and where some equally mysterious alchemy turns sperm in the anus into the AIDS virus, where such a thing as “legitimate rape” exists and global warming and evolution do not. This is a world where slavery really wasn’t so bad and anyway, whites were the real victims, apparently moping about and wishing they could be slaves too.

And what do you say to egregious and sustained Republican insistence that racism is a distant memory, or that women have attained equality of pay with men? Of all people, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has no right to call a Democrat delusional, not when the platform and ideology of his party is completely founded on delusion.

Tough to tell if any of those things are crazier than creationist Ken Ham calling for an end to the space program because any aliens we find are going to hell anyway, as though the Space Program was ever a proselytizing effort. In the end, how does one compare and rate samples of excrement? Ham’s real problem is that if the space program continues, we are almost certain to find life on another world – and sooner rather than later – thus bringing his creationist fantasy down around his ears.

This is a world where Kirk Cameron knows more than Stephen Hawking, where he and others can throw stones even while complaining they are being stoned. I could go on, but this article would never end, because, by myself, I can’t keep up with the fast and furious flow of Republican mendacity.

Far from creating a straw man, Republicans have created a straw country, one where nothing is as it seems, one that has no relationship – not even a passing resemblance – to the actual fact-based world in which we live. In short, Republicans lie. They lie about everything. They even lie about lying.

The world laughs. The Democrats – and the American people – are left holding the bag.